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A pink butterfly, fluorescent mountains and glowing green orbs
surrounded by bubbles are some of the imagery that appears in the
winning entries in a "bio-art" competition, which sought to
highlight the most artistic portrayals of biomedical research.

This year, 10 images out of about 100 entries were honored in the
first Bio-Art Competition, created by the Federation for American
Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). The winning entries
weren't ranked and all were generated by scientists as a
byproduct of of biomedical research.

Art wasn't the purpose of research to create artificial stem cell
factories, explore the biological basis for psychiatric disease
or look at the production of new neurons in the adult brain. Even
so, the winning entries included
brightly colored and sometimes abstract images.

The winners include one image depicting a scaffold, which
resembles the weave of a fabric, upon which cells can grow to
form new tissue. Glowing green orbs surrounded by bubbles reveal
systems intended to produce muscle stem cells; and images of
species of electric fish are trailed by recordings of the
discharges.

"Electric fish recognize other members of their own species using
the species-specific waveforms of these heartbeatlike
discharges," write the team lead by Matthew Arnegard of the Fred
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who created the
image. (Under the
contest guidelines, the image and the statement accompanying
it should be visually arresting and clearly communicate a
cutting-edge concept in biomedical science.)

Another winning entry depicts what looks like a fluorescent
three-dimensional map, but is actually genetically labeled cells
covering the walls of capillaries in a mouse
kidney. [ See
Photos of the Winning BioArt ]

University of Iowa's Li-Hsien Lin captured an image that appears
to be a pink butterfly, but is actually a rat spinal cord showing
the distribution of different types of enzymes. Understanding how
these enzymes work and interact in the nervous system, Lin
writes, could lead to better treatments for cardiovascular
diseases such as hypertension and heart failure.

Other honorees included: abstract art created from tissue from a
colon biopsy stained for a particular receptor; converging fibers
that form the optic nerve in
a mouse retina and their attendant immune cells; a 3D image
of the limb from a transgenic, embryonic mouse, with bright
colors differentiating the muscles, tendons, bones and
nerves; and the growth of new neurons in the adult brain.

FASEB is a coalition of biomedical research associations in the
United States. For this competition, the organization sought
original, laboratory-based images produced by current or former
National Institutes of Health-funded investigators,
contractors, trainees or members of FASEB constituent societies,
according to a news release.